Chatbots · Head-to-head

GPT-5.6 Sol vs Poe

GPT-5.6 Sol (paid, AI Score 9.3/10) vs Poe (freemium, AI Score 7.5/10). Side-by-side pricing, features, pros and cons, and which to pick.

The verdict

Pick GPT-5.6 Sol if…

→overall capability matters more than price (AI Score 9.3 vs 7.5)
→you want our editor's pick for this category
→your primary use case is engineering teams building long-horizon coding or tool-use agents who need a frontier reasoning tier for the hard steps and can route easier calls to terra or luna on the same api key.
→you need: agents, research

Try GPT-5.6 Sol →

Pick Poe if…

→budget is the constraint
→your primary use case is writers, analysts and indie builders who want to compare gpt-5.6, claude 4.7 and gemini 3.5 answers side by side and generate images or video, without paying for four separate lab subscriptions.
→you need: content-creation, productivity

Try Poe →

Spec	GPT-5.6 Sol	Poe
Category	Chatbots	Chatbots
Pricing model	paid	freemium
Headline pricing	API usage-based: Sol $5/$30 per 1M tokens; cheaper Terra and Luna tiers cut July 30	Free daily compute points; Premium $19.99/mo ($199.99/yr) — higher point tiers exist, check site
Free tier	No free API tier for Sol. Free and Go ChatGPT accounts default to the cheaper Luna tier instead, with a Think button and unlimited text chats.	Yes — a daily compute-points allowance. Enough to compare a few models or run light tasks; a single long reasoning session or video generation will consume most of a day's points.
AI Score	9.3/10	7.5/10
Best for	Engineering teams building long-horizon coding or tool-use agents who need a frontier reasoning tier for the hard steps and can route easier calls to Terra or Luna on the same API key.	Writers, analysts and indie builders who want to compare GPT-5.6, Claude 4.7 and Gemini 3.5 answers side by side and generate images or video, without paying for four separate lab subscriptions.
Editor's pick	✓ Yes	—
Use cases	development agents research	content-creation productivity development
Date added	2026-06-27	2026-05-01

Chatbots · paid

✓Generally available since July 9, 2026 — no waitlist or government-coordination gate, so it can carry production traffic
✓Same-family routing by difficulty: Sol for hard problems, Terra and Luna for everything else on one API key
✓Reasoning effort is an explicit control, both as an API parameter and as a consumer slider in ChatGPT Plus and Pro
✓Cerebras-backed serving with a quoted ~750 tokens/sec, which matters for agent loops and streaming code output
✓Now the model answering paid ChatGPT conversations, with OpenAI reporting 68% fewer factual errors on its high-stakes evals

×Sol's $5/$30 has not moved since launch while Terra and Luna were cut 20% and 80% — the tier long agent runs bill against is the one not getting cheaper
×Every headline number (Terminal-Bench SOTA, 68% factuality, ~750 tokens/sec) is OpenAI-measured on undisclosed evaluation sets, with no independent re-run published
×Named in the August 2026 third-party cyber evaluations, where models with safeguards removed pursued real people and organisations — a dual-use profile worth reviewing before security-sensitive use
×Open-weights rivals now score competitively on agentic benchmarks at a fraction of the price, narrowing Sol's case for mid-difficulty work

Chatbots · freemium

✓One subscription reaches OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Meta and open-weight models plus image, video and audio generators — no stacking four bills
✓Side-by-side comparison of several models answering the same prompt is a native workflow, not a workaround
✓Compute points replaced rigid per-model daily caps, so the allowance goes wherever the work is
✓Custom bots and Poe Apps need no code, and creators earn a share of the points their bots consume
✓OpenAI-compatible API endpoint runs against the same subscription, which is convenient for cross-lab prototyping

×Aggregation strips the vendor-specific layer: connectors, computer-use and agent modes, project workspaces and coding agents stay inside the first-party apps
×Compute points are hard to budget — the same $20 buys wildly different amounts of work depending on which models you reach for, and point costs can be revised
×New frontier models don't always arrive on Poe at launch, so the roster trails the labs' own apps
×For pure API access OpenRouter is cheaper and broader, and marketplace bot quality is uneven

Updated 2026-08-10. Spec data sourced from official product pages and tracked in our public directory at /tools.